[thewataccount]

Me and my friend both installed arch at the same time and both tried to use gnome + wayland.

Both of us experienced issues with games being inconsistent in frame times, black rectangles over electron apps like spotify/discord, for him his multi monitor setup was somehow broken on wayland but fine with X.

Chromium apps in general appear to have varying levels of issues, some applications don't support wayland at all, most can run with the xwayland which IMO mostly defeats the purpose especially when it's still not seamless.

We've both switched to X and no longer have any of the above issues. That's not to say the desktop experience on X is seamless of course, but the above issues were all solved.

I'm really under the impression that people who use wayland either don't use a wide range of applications (which is perfectly fine!) and/or are used to putting up with "typical linux issues" and accept the quirks.

I remember when wayland came out and was supposed to solved the "fragmented/bloated mess of xorg" but it literally just appears to have been a half-baked solution for ~15 years.

IMO the issue with the "linux desktop" has always been consistency. You don't have to worry about adding launch arguments, compositor support, graphics drivers, AMD/Nvidia, wine, broken audio/networking when you do an update, etc. MacOS/Windows "just work" - at least with far more consistency.

[nine_k]

I'm afraid you're a bit optimistic saying that Windows is consistent, or has no audio or graphics problems. My Linux laptop (xfce) is way more visually consistent than my wife's Windows desktop, and I had to troubleshoot audio issues on it, and on Windows laptops at work, but never on Linux (pipewire, onboard / USB / Bluetooth audio).

And yes, I run X, Wayland is too restrictive currently. I should give it another try some day though.

[ChuckNorris89]

>and I had to troubleshoot audio issues on it, and on Windows laptops at work, but never on Linux (pipewire, onboard / USB / Bluetooth audio).

Funny, it's always been the other way around for me.

My Ubuntu 22.04 at work keeps randomly switching the default audio output to the headphone jack of the machine and off my Bluetooth headphones leaving me without sound in my headphones until I go to the settings and switch it back to Bluetooth. Never had such issues with Windows, it's always been rock solid in this regard.

Would you mind sharing the exact audio issues you had with Windows?

[nine_k]

Win10, desktop, USB Bluetooth: audio not switching correctly when connecting / disconnecting headphones. Now appears to be fixed by some update. Digging through audio settings to find controls of particular audio interfaces is also fun.

HP Spectre x360 laptop (2020), factory-installed Win10: audio just dies sometimes. The Realtek's control panel (also factory-installed) periodically crashes. Funnily, booting a Linux live from a flash drive gave audio that worked without said problems. The laptop was later replaced with an updated one, when its graphics hardware visibly failed. The replacement did not have the audio problem (IDK if it was a different audio chip revision, firmware, or driver), but the Realtek control panel was still unstable.

(Visually Win10 has at least three UI toolkits that can barely agree on colors, and cannot agree on fonts or the shape of controls. Under X, I have all GTK2, GTK3, Qt5, Qt6 programs use the same fonts and a common theme, with controls, if not exactly uniform, at least having common colors, shapes, and sizes.)

[ChuckNorris89]

>HP Spectre x360 laptop (2020), factory-installed Win10 [...] but the Realtek control panel was still unstable

Well there's your problem, or more precise HP's problem, not Windows's problem. Don't use vendor crapware on your machine.

Always install a fresh copy of windows of a USB drive, not the recovery partition which holds the vendor crapware.

The built in windows audio switcher and audio drivers works just fine no need to use third party apps.

[thewataccount]

> Don't use vendor crapware on your machine

Wouldn't it be installed windows update anyway? I'm pretty sure windows installs whatever software is in it's repo the moment a device is discovered by default?

[ChuckNorris89]

No, Windows update will update it if it's already there from the factory, not if you have a fresh install from the official Microsoft ISO.

On a fresh install Windows update only install the corect drivers, no vendor apps.

The Realtek app is put there by the vendor (HP/Dell/Lenovo) from the factory in their spin of Windows. If you install a fresh vanilla copy of Windows from Microsft's website you won't have any of that nonsense.

[kaba0]

> Never had such issues with Windows, it's always been rock solid in this regard

I can’t even count the number of times windows reinstalling the sound driver or whatever it does at runtime, requiring a reboot.

I think people are very likely to blame the software layer even when they use subpar hardware — no software will run fine on shitty hardware, and the very inconsistent reports from basically any OS is more than likely the result of some underlying, failing hardware components. This also mostly explains why OSX is considered more stable by some — it is much easier supporting 10 different configs, than all the others.

I think Linux has undergone a huge improvement in this regard and actually has the best, general support for any hardware nowadays — it may happen that a given driver is better/only works for windows, but the mainline has shifted to Linux now.

[kaba0]

> and/or are used to putting up with "typical linux issues" and accept the quirks

As you later point out more explicitly, there is no way around that.

Linux is the epitome of bazaar style development - it has endless positives, but a huge drawback is not having a consistent direction, nor any real force behind any of the directions.

Apple can just say that they will now support a new compositor, if you wanna stay in business, change. And it will happen. But that’s not a technical thing at all, wayland’s first 10 years is very different from the next 5 one — since it has become mainstream now, its support and hands working on it will result in exponentially more improvements. A new direction needs critical mass, and wayland has only recently acquired that, imo.

[ghostpepper]

Mainline Chromium (and subsequently Electron) support for wayland has only really landed in the last year or so. I'm curious how long ago this trial of yours was?

[thewataccount]

Yeah I think I remember seeing that, we did this around 6 months ago so not many actual applications used the newer version of electron, although IIRC a lot of electron applications don't update electron itself super frequently.

I might try wayland again, I'm just really frustrated with it. It's always been advertised to be better then X, and 15 years in it's still a rocky mess (as of ~6 months ago).

This isn't 100% waylands fault - but nvidia cards seem to add extra issues. I need CUDA support so AMD is not an option.

[kaba0]

> This isn't 100% waylands fault - but nvidia cards seem to add extra issues. I need CUDA support

Well, there you go. NVIDIA for the longest time didn’t support linux, period. They add proprietary binary blobs to patch xserver to work. It’s no surprise that some normal userspace program can’t do something the kernel can’t do either.